chanamessinger
Margaret Fuller, intoxicated by Transcendentalism, said, “I accept the universe,” and Thomas Carlyle, told of the remark, supposedly said, “Gad, she’d better.”
I imagine what they might be doing is acknowledging that they have a variety of reactions to the facts or events in question, but haven’t taken the time to weigh them so as to come up with a blend or selection that is one of: {most accurate, most comfortable, most high status}
“His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”—Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (b. 1949)
You might enjoy a reverse dictionary, where you search words by their meanings: https://reversedictionary.org/
Or finding Related Words: https://relatedwords.org/
Or being able to search for common adjectives / descriptors for a given noun: describingwords.io
This is so helpful, thank you!
For what it’s worth, I think some of those terrible ideas are great or close to great.
In particular:
Hire a team of well-paid moderators for a three-month high-effort experiment of responding to every bad comment with a fixed version of what a good comment making the same point would have looked like. Flood the site with training data.
Make a fork of LessWrong run by me, or some other hopeless idealist that still thinks that there might be something actually good that we can get if we actually do the thing (but not if we don’t).
Create an anonymous account with special powers called TheCultureCurators or something, and secretly give the login credentials to a small cadre of 3-12 people with good judgment and mutual faith in one another’s good judgment. Give TheCultureCurators the ability to make upvotes and downvotes of arbitrary strength, or to add notes to any comment or post à la Google Docs, or to put a number on any comment or post that indicates what karma TheCultureCurators believe that post should have.
Rob Bensinger wants me to note that he agrees.
The first one would be costly and annoying to lots of people but also time boxed and super interesting. Training data is really good, and very pedagogically valuable.
The second one just seems low cost to everyone except the idealist, so if they’re willing, great!
The third would be controversial and complicated, but for instance putting a number for what karma they think it should have wouldn’t change the current voting system and add information and could be time boxed like the first one.
Mostly I appreciate just the generation of lots of ideas to give my brain more to chew on and a sense that bigger things are possible.
Also more generally I really resonate with “dear God, I need the other people around me to be good at this to be my best self.”
I’m curious what you and others think of Raelfin’s post about the karma system: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xN2sHnLupWe4Tn5we/improving-on-the-karma-system
Oh yeah, I’ve seen you post this before, I liked it!
What comes to mind immediately for me is that conveying those of these that are relatively empirical to newcomers in each given field seems really valuable.
The other move, I think, is something like “my cat’s not doing well”, which is pretty fucked up to say if false, but does put the frame back on “you don’t know what’s going on with me and you don’t get to assume”.
How To Raise Others’ Aspirations in 17 Easy Steps
It is definitely important to have sense of who you’re talking to and what they need (law of equal and opposite advice). For what it’s worth, 5-10 and 13 are aimed to be disproportionately helpful for people who have trouble doing things (depending on the reason).
I definitely find it helpful to be surrounded by people who will do this for me and help me cultivate a habit of it over time. The case for it being very impactful is if people do a one-time thing, like apply for something or put themselves in the running for something that they otherwise wouldn’t have that makes a big difference. The ones that are about accountability (Can I remind you about that in a week?) also are sort of a conscientiousness loan, which can be cheap since it can be easier to check in on other people than to do it for yourself.
Nice! Welcome!
I saw people discussing forecasting success of this on twitter and people were saying that the intelligence agencies actually called this right. Does anyone know an easy link to what those agencies were saying?
Context: https://twitter.com/ClayGraubard/status/1496699988801433602?s=20&t=mQ8sAzMRppI8Pr44O38M3w
https://twitter.com/ClayGraubard/status/1496866236973658112?s=20&t=mQ8sAzMRppI8Pr44O38M3w
How to Lumenate (UK Edition)
Tried to buy those, didn’t have any luck finding ones that fit nicely into my sockets! (An embarassing mistake I didn’t describe in detail is buying corn bulbs that turned out to be...mini?) If you have an amazon UK link for ones with E27 threading, that would be awesome.
ETA: Having looked, it looks like not all corn bulbs are brighter than the ones I have, though I have now found 2000 lumen ones. I don’t know if corn bulbs are still better if they have lower lumens. I would guess not?
ETA 2: The link above does have E27 if you click through the multiple listings in the same link, wasn’t obvious to me at first, thanks!
Your link’s lightbulbs have a bayonet style, not the E27 threading :) Thanks for the other link! Amazon says currently unavailable.
ETA: Found some, will add to post
Unfortunately I’m not seeing anything close to that on the Amazon UK site :/
Might be bad search skills, though.
True! 65 Watts! That would really be something.
Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought. -Matsuo Basho, poet (1644-1694)
Seems like a good way to think of the “seek to succeed, not to be rational” idea.